Nama expects to “resolve” the remaining 25 ghost housing estates in its portfolio by the close of this year.

In a year-end review published Thursday, the State agency said it had 332 unfinished housing estates on its books in 2010. This figure had fallen to 25 by the end of last year and it is “expected that these will be resolved during 2017”.

No details on how this might be achieved were provided.

Nama also said it will pay off its remaining €2.6 billion in senior debt by the end of this year, subject to market conditions. It had originally set a date of 2020 to pay off its €30.2 billion senior debt in full but strong cash generation has left it in a position to repay all of this money by the end of this year.

Post subject: Re: Nama to ‘resolve’ remaining ghost estates by end of 2017

Posted: Sat Aug 12, 2017 12:45 pm

Too Big to Fail

Joined: May 18, 2009Posts: 4126

Quote:

A decade after the crash, Shannon Valley housing estate, on the outskirts of Ballaghaderreen, in Co Roscommon, remains unfinished and partly in ruins. Although the number of “unfinished housing developments” has fallen sharply since 2010, Shannon Valley is one of hundreds that still dot the country.

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“I just want the houses to go away because there are rats and I want the estate to be clean,” says Maryam, standing next to her big sister Fatima.

Their mother, Shadab, says she tries to keep an eye on her children when they are playing out front. She is afraid that the children will pick up an infection from the vermin. Last year they had an infestation of rats from the derelict houses which were drawn to the smell of food. She put traps down in the house most days.

“Every day I put one or two in the bin. It was very bad,” she says.

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He bought the house off plans for €165,000, all with his own money. He estimates that it is worth between €40,000 and €50,000 now. The Property Price Register shows that just five houses have sold in the estate in the past four years, ranging in price from €17,000 in December 2013 to €40,000 in July 2016.

Hand laughs when asked whether he regrets buying here.

“Yeah, €165,000. I would get three bungalows out the road for that and I would have peace and quiet,” he says.

“It’s f**king desperate here. The shouting and roaring. It’s not only what’s in here. It’s what they draw and who comes in to visit them. It is like no man’s land. You just mind your own business. You pull the curtains and stay inside.”

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Maura Hopkins, a local resident and Fine Gael senator who is the party’s Seanad spokeswoman on Arts, Heritage and Regional, Rural and Gaeltacht Development, says Shannon Valley is “particularly difficult” to resolve.

The €250,000 allocated last year went to nine unfinished estates across the county but Hopkins notes that the standard of building completed means that it will take large investment to bring the roads, sewerage systems and lighting to a standard where they can be “taken-in-charge” by the council.

What I don't understand is that wouldn't a developer be required to have insurance or lodge a bond with his bank in the event that if he goes under, the development would be finished to a decent standard?

_________________“Darling – I’ve gone to the Labour rally. Scavenge for your supper in the dustbin.”

Post subject: Re: Nama to ‘resolve’ remaining ghost estates by end of 2017

Posted: Sat Aug 12, 2017 2:02 pm

Too Big to Fail

Joined: May 6, 2008Posts: 4454Location: the nearest faraway place

Mossy_Heneberry wrote:

What I don't understand is that wouldn't a developer be required to have insurance or lodge a bond with his bank in the event that if he goes under, the development would be finished to a decent standard?

I've seen fully finished houses in ghost estates get striped of windows, doors, fittings etc in the years after. I amazed actually more didn't get torched by bored local kids.

_________________Every single frozen corpse on Everest was once a highly motivated person.

Those who don't study history are doomed to repeat it. Those who do study history are doomed to watch everyone else repeating it.

Post subject: Re: Nama to ‘resolve’ remaining ghost estates by end of 2017

Posted: Sun Aug 13, 2017 4:01 pm

Under CAB Investigation

Joined: Apr 2, 2008Posts: 2016Location: Cork and Kerry

Mossy_Heneberry wrote:

What I don't understand is that wouldn't a developer be required to have insurance or lodge a bond with his bank in the event that if he goes under, the development would be finished to a decent standard?

No, I don't have proof of the following but it does seem to be the case based on two local examples that I am familiar with.1. We know from the Mahon Tribunal of the close connections that exist(ed) between County Councillors as well as Executives.2. We know from development levies that money was generally meant to be provided to cover future site dependent development costs.3. Well, roll on the Financial crisis and what arises is that the Banks get enabled to have special protection provided at the cost to the state and taxpayer.4. To rub it in, it turns out that many of these "housing estates" were being mainly financed by the Banks and that the money item No. 2 above was in the form of Banking Bonds or guarantees.5. The Councils get complaints from residents who if well enough connected and empowered enable the making of fencing in of the estates or closing off from access or tidying up of critical issues. But the proviso was that generally THE BONDS WERE NOT TO BE CASHED IN.6. If they were cashed in by the county councils/local authorities/city councils then arrangements would be made to ensure that a message got delivered to said council about their future central government subventions.

It was all agreed by the powers that be, the untouchables.

DON'T TOUCH THE BANKS!

_________________There is a reality other than the one we are told about...

Weekend Read: The ghost estates that still haunt IrelandA decade after the crash, hundreds remain home to rats, brambles and despairing residents

Sat, Aug 12, 2017, 07:00

Quote:

The high concentration of the estates in the Roscommon-Longford-Leitrim area – and among the hardest to address – can be traced back to the decision of Fianna Fáil minister for finance Charlie McCreevy to grant lucrative tax breaks under the Upper Shannon rural renewal scheme in 1998. The scheme was extended for two more years by his successor in the department, Brian Cowen, in 2006.The scheme continued even after Goodbody Economic Consultants warned in a February 2006 report that it amounted to poor value for money as the tax cost per housing unit was very high, had little direct impact on economic activity and resulted in an excess supply of housing in the region.

Economist and Longford native Gerard Brady, head of tax and fiscal policy at employers’ group Ibec, called the scheme “an unadulterated disaster” for the region. He estimates that it cost the taxpayer €400 million in lost revenue due to tax breaks and led to about 11,000 housing units being built over the scheme’s 10-year duration (1998 to 2008), including 4,500 buy-to-let properties, in an area with a population of just 250,000.The Revenue Commissioners could not provide the exact cost of the Upper Shannon tax break scheme in lost revenue.But the scheme was mouth-watering from a tax-avoidance perspective: the value of the tax break was worth 15-20 per cent of the total cost of building the house, including the value of the land.

Department of Housing’s statistics on new house construction show the frenzy of activity that these kind of breaks spawned. There was more house-building in Counties Roscommon, Leitrim and Longford combined than in each of Limerick, Galway and Waterford at the peak of the boom in 2005 and 2006.Brady estimates that based on the department’s figures there were more houses built in the Upper Shannon counties between 2001 and 2007 than had been built there in the preceding 30 years and that in 2006 and 2007 there were 30 per cent more houses built in Longford than in Cork city and 40 per cent more than in Galway.

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Lynskey’s colleague Emmett Corcoran, a Roscommon communications consultant, says the large amount of poor quality stock in the ghost estates is suppressing the price of houses generally in the area and discouraging people from taking on additional debt by building new houses because they cost more.“The ghost estates are a hangover from the boom that is impeding this area getting anything like a construction industry back in the region,” he says.

The ghost-estate effect on this area was borne out in a house price report last month by property website Daft.ie, which found that the cheapest place to buy a property was Ballaghaderreen, home to Shannon Valley. The average property value in the town was just €58,000, according to Daft.“That comes not just from the distance to jobs but the distance to jobs coupled with over-development,” says the author of the report, Ronan Lyons, Trinity College Dublin economist.Lyons says the government’s Upper Shannon tax relief scheme that blighted the region was a classic example of politicians kidding themselves that people could combine urban working with rural living.“Ireland is going the way of other high-income countries: to earn a high wage you need to be living in densely populated cities. We have this sort of weird phenomenon where we have one-third of people living in the cities formally but two-thirds working in the city so we have got this middle third,” he says.

“That is not an efficient or environmentally friendly way to do it but it is reflective of this mindset: ‘Well, we don’t need to live in the city; we can live rurally and still enjoy that high income way of life.’ I don’t think that is true. You need to have density to have good quality services.”